


Real and Fake

by semperama



Series: Tumblr Ficlets - Pinto [23]
Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: Interviews, M/M, Press and Tabloids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-12-04 03:25:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11546502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperama/pseuds/semperama
Summary: I don’t want you to love me like they love me, Chris wants to say.





	Real and Fake

**Author's Note:**

> The interview questions and answers are all taken from [this](http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/interviews/a37331/cherchez-la-femme-chris-pine/) interview.

_You mean talk-show anecdotes aren’t real?_

_God, come on. The amount of shit you have to come up with to pass the time…_

——

“What should we say this time?” Zach asks, grinning. “You know, when they inevitably ask us about it.”

Chris ignores the rodent-like skitter of his heart and wonders how long this will go on, how long until the press with stop caring about the past and start focusing more on the future. What can he do, he wonders, to make them forget? They are like magpies, and all he needs is something new and shiny to distract them.

“It’s better if we don’t plan it, man,” he says, rolling his shoulders and then his neck even though it does nothing for the way his muscles are tightening and tightening until his back aches and his head aches and fuck, he needs something to eat. “I don’t know, let’s just riff off each other and see what happens.”

Zach is intrigued, and an intrigued Zach is a satisfied Zach. It’s why Chris likes him so much, he reminds himself. Why he loves him. They’re the same in this way, though Chris didn’t know it that first night, the night everyone asks about in their own oblique ways. That night all he knew were Zach’s mouth and hands and skin, the way his body seemed miles long when it leaned back against the bathroom sink and beckoned Chris closer. Chris fantasizes about telling the cameras that, telling them how Zach tasted and what he sounded like and how fucking good it felt to feel wanted and at home in his own skin for once in his goddamn life.

But no, they can’t know, they can never know. _We also tan at the same place, bleach our teeth at the same time._ Zach’s loving it, eating it up. Oh Chris, you’re so funny. And Chris can’t even blame him, because funny is exactly what he’s going for.

Look what I’ve got in this hand. Look, shiny.

——

_So you’re single now?_

_Next question._

——

“Is it true, Pine?” Zach laughs in his ear. “That story about taking the girl to the department store?”

Chris shifts the phone to the other shoulder and is grateful Zach can’t see his face, the brief flash of annoyance and hurt. “Are you seriously asking me if that’s true?”

“Ahh.” Zach says it quickly enough to make Chris deflate with relief. “I didn’t think so. Although you could probably pull it off without being a douche. It’d be cute, if you did it. Not flaunty.”

“You want me to buy you something nice, Zachary? Just say the word.”

“I can buy my own stuff, thank you very much.” The words curl up warm and comforting in Chris’s ear, almost as good as _I love you_. “I do miss my shopping buddy though. I spent like thirty minutes agonizing over this mustard sweater yesterday—”

“Don’t you already have a mustard sweater?”

“I knew you’d say that.” When Chris closes his eyes, Zach’s smile is twenty feet high in his mind. “That’s why I didn’t buy it.” Almost as an afterthought, he adds, “I bought green instead.”

“I like you in green,” Chris says without thinking.

He could cry when Zach says, “I knew you’d say that too.”

——

_You’ve often talked about how unattractive you were in high school. Since then, you’ve dated several models. Are you making up for lost time?_

_At the time, I was in love with these girls and that’s how it works. But I think the desire to be with someone beautiful…I just had such a different experience growing up._

——

Zach was lanky back then—that night in the bathroom. His hair was sort of horrific and he was wearing something with the most God-awful stripes. Chris’s hands were so sweaty and fumbly he didn’t think he’d be able to peel Zach’s too-skinny skinny jeans down. Maybe then Zach wouldn’t have been considered gorgeous by most, but Chris thought he was. And every time he’s seen him since then, he just get’s more beautiful.

When Zach calls him gorgeous though, it’s all wrong. Anyone else can say it, and it’s good, it feels so good, like cool water and he a man whose thirst can never be quenched. But when Zach says it? Chris shrinks and curls in on himself, his eyes dart away and it’s not pleasure making the blood rush to his cheeks.

“What’s wrong?” Zach asks him one night, after he’s whispered in Chris’s ear that he looked good, so good tonight, his hands already working Chris’s suit jacket off his shoulders. After Chris flinched away, batted at Zach’s hands and twisted out of his grip.

“I need a cigarette,” Chris says breathlessly as he darts for the door that leads to the balcony. He’s still fumbling impotently with the lighter, the unlit cigarette shuddering between his lips, when Zach slips out behind him.

Zach takes the lighter, takes the cigarette, puts it in his own mouth and lights it. He slips the lighter into his own pocket and puts one hand on Chris’s face, snatches the smoke out of his mouth with the other. “What’s wrong?” he asks again. “Don’t bullshit me.”

He’s always looked at him like he really wants to hear the truth straight from the depths of Chris’s heart. What a fucking miracle, in a world full of people who only want to hear what they expect to hear.

“You didn’t know me when I was a teenager,” Chris says. “Neither did any of the people who think I’m good-looking now.”

Zach blows smoke into his face when he laughs. Chris inhales deep, his eyes watering.

“I had a bowl cut until high school, Christopher,” Zach says. “I had a unibrow almost that long.”

 _I don’t want you to love me like they love me_ , Chris wants to say. He thinks for a minute that he’s going to break down. Right here and now. Sob all the weariness out, all the struggle of trying to be real and fake at the same time, to make the person he is inside match the person outside. He doesn’t trust anyone to see the truth but he doesn’t want them to love a lie either.

Zach’s face changes. He moves in close and drapes his arms over Chris’s shoulders, holds his gaze until it’s no longer comfortable and then keeps holding it. “I don’t have to have known you then,” he says. “I know you now. I _know_ you. Don’t I?”

Chris shuts his eyes, waits a beat, two, then gives up and slumps into Zach’s chest, tucking his head up under his chin and loving the way the exact shape and size of his body is so familiar when they’re pressed together like this. Pressed together just like that first night. The night he thought Zach was miles long.

“I love you,” he says, because he knows Zach too, and knows what he needs right now. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Zach holds him for what seems like too short a time but might well have been hours or days or years. When he draws back, he kisses Chris firmly on the mouth and then slides the cigarette between his lips. Somehow, it’s not a bad punctuation mark on the moment. It’s fitting, in fact. “I’m going to take a shower. You smoke that, and then come to bed?”

“Yeah.” Behind Zach is the skyline of some unfamiliar city made familiar by his presence. Chris can feel the smile lines forming at the corners of his own eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll be right in.”


End file.
